President Barack Obama is such a soaringly eloquent occupant of the bully pulpit that it was easy to overlook just how lacking in substantial proposals last week’s State of the Union address really was.

California, however, has much at stake in the two concrete issues the chief executive did raise — an increase in the federal minimum wage and a rekindling of hope for at least incremental reform of our broken immigration system.

Clearly, the president hopes to redefine success in his second term, recalibrating according to a reduced set of public expectations. Many of the most difficult foreign policy questions currently pressing themselves on Washington went unmentioned Tuesday, or were marked only in passing. Perhaps that’s because his administration sees no plausible solution to any of them — including the appalling civil war in Syria, where the Assad regime seems to be welshing on promises to come clean about its chemical weapons stocks; the alarming deterioration of the security situation in Iraq; the reimposition of authoritarian military rule in Egypt, and the uncertainties over Afghan disengagement.

On the domestic front, Obama also appears bent on dialing down public expectations. His decision to issue an executive order raising the hourly minimum wage to $10.10 for workers employed by federal contractors is a welcome step, as is his decision to support a proposal currently working its way through Congress to incrementally increase the current federal minimum wage of $7.25 to $10.10 by 2016. A 40 percent raise in a period of stagnant wages and incomes is not inconsequential, but we also need to be realistic about what it can accomplish.

The question over whether minimum wage increases are, in fact, job killers is a contentious one that divides even scrupulous economists. The current weight of scholarly opinion, though, seems to be such raises don’t depress employment, at least not here in the United States. On the other hand, it’s also clear that the benefits of such raises are felt mostly at the margins. In part, that’s because outside the agricultural sector, 46 percent of minimum wage earners work only part time and more than half in such positions remain at that pay level for six months or less before moving on or receiving some increase from their employers.

Moreover, even if you assume that a worker receiving $10.10 an hour is employed full time, the increase translates into an annual income of $21,008. That still leaves a family of four below the official federal poverty level of $23,550.

That said, any reasonable increase is a matter of great significance to both California and its largest city, Los Angeles. That’s because, for all the robust size and variety of the state’s economy, we also have the country’s largest population living below the poverty level. One in four Californians is poor. In Los Angeles, the actual poverty rate is about 30 percent, but more than three-quarters of those living at or below the official poverty level are members of “the working poor” — that is, they reside in households where one or more of the residents is employed. Many are concentrated in sectors like the culinary industry, where an average wage is $9.28 an hour or are service workers whose hourly pay hovers at or below $10. Doing something for them and for the state’s agricultural workers, most of whom make the current federal minimum of $7.25, is nothing to sneeze at, though it’s surely not enough.

Any fight over increasing the minimum wage — however modestly — is bound to be long, bitter and fraught with misinformation, but one thing to keep in mind is this: When you adjust for inflation, even boosting the federal minimum to $10.10 still leaves it well below what it was in 1965. Necessary it may be, but generous or even adequate it isn’t.

Similarly, even if House Speaker John Boehner is able to convince the recalcitrant members of his caucus that they ought to sign on to at least piecemeal immigration reform, it will fall well short of the comprehensive overhaul that is so desperately needed and which the last two presidents have sought.

Even so, some sort of legalization for those immigrants in the country without papers, even if it doesn’t include the path to citizenship that it should, would be welcome in California. So, too, would a carefully regulated guest worker program for agriculture, which currently undergoes seasonal and costly labor shortages. It’s easy to see why: Of the 25 percent to 30 percent of Californians currently living in poverty, a majority are Latinos, many of them recent immigrants or their American-born children.

About 40 million immigrants now reside in the United States, one in four of them in California. Somewhere between 2.4 million and 2.8 million of these foreign-born Californians are without papers, which means that 24 percent of the nation’s estimated 11.7 undocumented immigrants live in this state, about 900,000 of them in Los Angeles County alone. In the Inland Empire, 8 percent of the adults are undocumented immigrants, and 14 percent of all children have a parent without papers.

As has been pointed out previously in this column, forcing them to continue living in the shadows imposes burdensome legal costs. Because so many reside in households where some family members, particularly small children and students, are U.S. citizens, hundreds of thousands of California families live with the constant anxiety that some minor brush with the authorities will send fathers or mothers back to their native countries. Make no mistake, there has been nothing “soft” about the Obama administration’s approach to enforcing the existing immigration statutes. Deportations, many of which tragically sunder families, have proceeded at a record pace under this president. Immigration lawyers say that the only reason more people aren’t being expelled from the country is that officials simply can’t process a greater number of cases than they are now.

By the most conservative estimates, making legal status available to our undocumented immigrants would generate an additional $1.5 billion in annual economic activity in L.A. County alone; statewide, the yearly gain would be $4.6 billion. That’s why overwhelming majorities of Californians of all backgrounds tell pollsters they favor a path to citizenship for the undocumented, though given the composition of this Congress that may remain beyond reach.

When it comes to both the minimum wage and immigration reform, what’s currently on offer in Washington isn’t nearly up to California’s needs, nor to those of the nation as a whole. The human tragedies inflicted by doing nothing about these situations, however, dictate that even less than half a loaf is better than nothing.

Tim Rutten is a columnist for the Los Angeles News Group. ruttencolumn@gmail.com.